These are golden times for media centrists. Sinecures as far as the eye can see in multiple mediums, and the only thing you’re accountable to is how well you vomit the conventional wisdom. Easy peesy lemon squeezy.

Seeing this stuff for what it is and calling it out with inappropriate cussing and sexual imagery, on the other hand, is difficult difficult lemon difficult. You have to show how language choice and emphasis and tone and all these weird amorphous concepts conspire to advance a specific political effect or vision. Tough stuff.

But lo, like a Lady in the Lake clad in shimmering samite, fate has thrown a gift from her inscrutable depths: Republicans which are just balls-out crazy and no longer give a fuck about hiding their sociopathy. And when this unstoppable force meets the moist quivering sponge of centrist journalism, the latter can’t help but get swept away, exposing itself in the process.

These meaningless fluff words from the first few paragraphs do not belong in a story recounting the most mendacious American political speech given in at least the past five years, and they were written from a place of cowardice.

The fact that a few more paragraphs down the actual lies were recounted with “fudged facts” language, in a manner that makes it seem like typical political practice, becomes much easier to discern and almost beside the point.

Mmmmm does my regular pre-capitulation to authority get you wet baby seems like it

The centrist pundit cannot stop, of course, it’s a compulsion, a dark passenger borne of insecurity and ego, so last night after Romney’s speech Crowley went on Greta’s House of Pain. After a speech which featured snide jokes with literal lip-curls and birther shout-outs and a fucking call-and-response section where a stadium full of assdicks chanted “no” in unison, Crowley had this to say about Romney accepting the nomination:

It was more sorrow than anger . . . not an angry message, we’ve talked so much in that last few years about the anger out there, in the tea party and the primaries, yknow, all of us were at primary events were voters were just furious and they wanted to just stand up and yell and give speeches.

But the tone tonight was sorrow, not anger, “let’s do something that we don’t feel great about doing but the time has come, we gave the guy a chance . . . but it’s over”

Fuck you, Michael Crowley. Crichton might have given you a small dick in one of his books for petty reasons, but you deserve a far worse fictional fate:

Greta underneath that early-90s haircut is a fucking dumb mind . . . it’s irresistible. Let’s make tonight special and pull out the bloody gloves.

“Could allowing Israel to strike Iran have a net-positive outcome? Israel wouldn’t be ready for retaliation, especially Tel-Aviv, and would be hit hard. That would make Israel ready for a negotiated peace. In exchange for monitored Iranian nuclear program, Israel could be persuaded to leave the West Bank, maybe even the Golan Heights! It’s worth a shot, because after all diplomacy sometimes ends in [and this is the exact phrase that is used] “costly war”. There is another way of course this is far-fetched and diplomacy is always best we should do everything possible to keep from engaging in this last resort which I have just spent thousands of words defending in glowing terms.”

Centrist crimes:

Explaining the benefits of another motherfucking goddamn fucking unnecessary war. Fuck you. Centrist crime against humanity, life in the Hague.

Treating massive civilian death as a perhaps tad messy but otherwise neutral way to accomplish strategic goals. “Tel-Aviv is not built to withstand an Iranian attack and would get pounded. Good news for the negotiating table!”

Spinning out elaborate scenarios based on hyperspecific assumptions about the interaction of complex and unknowable variables. “The war will proceed like this in such and such timeframe, and Israeli public opinion will respond like that in such and such timeframe, which will affect the negotiating positions of Israeli leaders in this specific way, which will force them to solve this festering sore of apartheid which has been one of the most intractable geopolitical problems in the post WWII era.” You do not advocate a fucking war by writing fanfic with international countries. That’s just something decent people don’t do.

Never once, at all, considering the response of someone considered an enemy in any capacity to be anything other than what the centrist wants and requires it to be.

Using the faux-erudite tone de rigeur among centrists which wraps everything in cotton in a very sober and reasoned way that makes the insane fucking things the author is saying seem objective and inevitable.

Refusing to even gesture toward potential negative geopolitical consequences of starting a fucking war in the Middle East while writing about the potential benefits. Double life sentences in the Hague.

I don’t know this Israeli professor, don’t know his politics, don’t know his academic work. But fuck him for vomiting that centrist militarist effluvia into the public sphere.